Looking at Changes in the Rear View Mirror

For reasons that I do not fully understand, people resist the notion that things will change in the future. This is odd because if you were to ask someone if they thought the world would be static for the remainder of their life, they would dismiss the question as being silly. If you ask what they think will change, they will probably offer ideas that are not really changes, rather extensions of what is already going on. I think their is some interesting psychological research in this idea. Why do people resist the idea of change. What kinds of changes are acceptable. And so on. But, the problem is - how do you get people to allow for the possibility of change when those changes are not ones that they would readily accept?

A technique that I use, which seems to be somewhat successful is what I call looking at change in the rear view mirror. Instead of have a person evaluate the likelihood of changes in the future, have them imagine being in the future looking back. I have introduced this technique before when I told about having students imagine they were grandparents talking to their grand kids about changes that occurred in their past in the scenario, but in their futures for real.   

Here is a simple example. There has been some talk on the television about cars that park themselves and brake themselves if a car in front has braked. These are both fairly safe examples so their is not much resistance. But, if you roll things ahead a bit and talk about self driving cars where the person merely goes for a ride and has no control over the car people start getting nervous. I think it is the lack of control and the belief that these cars will not really work so the person still needs to be able over ride the car's autopilot. This is actually silly when you think about it. This would be like having an over ride switch on your anti-lock brakes that would allow you to eliminate their interference when you slam on the brakes.

To put this into perspective, imagine a future as far out as you need to in order to accept the reality of self driving cars. Imagine that everyone uses self driving cars and that they have been around for decades virtually eliminating traffic accidents while conserving fuel and allowing the riders to do other productive tasks. Then imagine some catastrophe that makes self driving no longer viable. Perhaps the Internet is destroyed, or sunspots knock out GPS, or some sort of virus has destroyed the driving chips. What ever the reason, cars can no longer drive themselves and people have to switch to manual driving mode in order to get around. What kind of chaos would that bring?

We tend to see the ways things are as the best way that things could be rather than seeing the way things are as merely making the best of a bad situation. When we look at it in the rear view mirror, things look a little different.